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Selected Poems

Thomas Blackburn
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781857545036
  • Weight: 140g
  • Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 24 Jan 2001
  • Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

Thomas Blackburn was haunted. His child-hood was dominated by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin, and an over-affectionate mother. Moral and sexual uncertainties form the core of his poetry and prose. In a creative life interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he wrote into the 1970s, developing an intimate and confessional voice of great power.

He began to publish in the late 1940s, combining writing with two other passions: mountain climbing and spiritualism. Notable collections include The Outer Darkness (1951), The Holy Stone (1954), The Next Word (1958), and A Smell of Burning (1961). The poet was regarded as having 'gone off', overwhelmed by Jung and Yeats. A Selected Poems appeared in 1975, and the posthumous Bread for the Winter Birds in 1980. His autobiography, A Clip of Steel (1969), is an unsparing self-portrait.
About Thomas Blackburn
Thomas Eliel Fenwick Blackburn was born in Cumbria in 1916. Educated at Durham University, he was Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University (1956-8), and head of the English Department at the College of St Mark and St John, Chelsea (1960-73). He wrote novels, memoirs, musicals and plays for radio, as well as poetry. He died in 1977. Julia Blackburn, his daughter by his second wife, is a novelist, biographer and journalist. Julia Blackburn is the daughter of the poet Thomas Blackburn and the painter Rosalie de Meric. She has written two novels (both shortlisted for the Orange Prize), a memoir The Three of Us (winner of the JR Ackerley Award), a collection of poems, Murmurations of Love, Grief and Starlings (Full Circle, 2015) and nine works of non-fiction of which the most recent, Time Song, was published by Cape in 2019. She lives in Suffolk and in Italy.

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